Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Brian McAllister" <[email protected]> · Thu, 22 Jul 2004 16:17:01 -0400

>>> On 7/13/2004 at 8:38:48 EDT, Paul Sichta wrote:

  > At the 2002 EPICS meeting at JLAB the MIT/Bates folks presented some
  > work they did with a Linux IOC using PCI and COMEDI. The concept
  > sounded promising at the time, but I haven't heard any news from them
  > on the topic.  Zwart and Lougham were the principals.

Bates is using the Comedi drivers in conjunction with device support
written here.  There are two components to comedi, a set of drivers and a
library providing an API to access them.

At this time, we are using the following NI cards:

   PCI-6034e (bo, bi, ai, mbbo, mbbi, mbboDirect, mbbiDirect)
   PCI-6503  (bo, bi, mbbo, mbbi, mbboDirect, mbbiDirect)
   PCI-6703  (bo, bi, ao, mbbo, mbbi, mbboDirect, mbbiDirect)

Device support was also developed for:

   PCI-6024e (bo, bi, ao, ai, mbbo, mbbi, mbboDirect, mbbiDirect)
   PCI-6025e (bo, bi, ao, ai, mbbo, mbbi, mbboDirect, mbbiDirect)
   PCI-DIO-96 (bo, bi, mbbo, mbbi, mbboDirect, mbbiDirect)

The person who developed this (Dylan Loughnan) is no longer at Bates.  I
have been familiarizing myself with his work and attempting to organize it
so that it can be packaged for distribution.

This software was written using the comedilib interface, with the drivers
loaded as modules.  My recollection is that the drivers can also be built
into the kernel directly, and that there is a different API that uses
system calls rather than comedilib.

One issue I am aware of is that the version of Comedi we are using
(comedilib V0.7.19, comedi V0.7.66) requires a particular Linux kernel
version (2.4.18-27.7.x) and probably won't work properly with other
kernels.  As our systems are on a private network, and dedicated as IOCs,
this is not concern for us.

----
Brian McAllister                    Controls Programmer/Beam Physicist
[email protected]                        MIT-Bates Linear Accelerator
(617) 253-9537                                           Middleton, MA

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System